Monstrous Affections

The entrance to the nursing home was both grand and unobtrusive, Leah thought, as if nobody wanted to be reminded that beyond the high white wall that hid the building from the road, past the elegant sign saying Silver Pines, behind the inoffensive clapboard front of the huge, rambling Victorian, were old people who were unlikely to ever leave the place alive.

She sighed and tried to push the depressing thought away. She was having nothing but depressing thoughts these days, and the lack of anyone to talk to about them didn’t help. Once she’d been able to talk to her mother about anything, but not anymore.

“Are you nervous about your first day of work?” asked Grandma Ruth as they bumped up the gravel drive. Grandma drove the way most old people drove: all white knuckles and squinched-up eyes as if she were being tortured.

Leah scrunched down in her seat, trying to avoid her own reflection in the mirrored sunshade. The pale blue uniform everyone at Silver Pines had to wear clashed with her olive skin, and her braids (“hair must be tied back at all times”) made her look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “Nothing says I have to do this except Mom. We could just turn this car around right now and never tell her I didn’t go.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Grandma lightly. She pursed her lips, painted the same shade of seashell pink as her nails. Her hair was perfectly set, too — once a week at the beauty parlor kept it looking like a shiny helmet. “It’ll do you good to get out. You can’t hang around the house with me forever watching my programs.”

Leah wasn’t so sure about that. Grandma’s house smelled musty, but it was dark and peaceful, and she was starting to develop an interest in Days of Our Lives.

“So instead of spending time at home with one old person, I get to go out and spend time with a lot of old people?” she grumbled.

“At least you’ll be moving,” said Grandma, and mimed walking with her fingers. They were drawing up at the circular drive in front of the home. There were massive wide stairs leading down from the front door and two wheelchair ramps. A woman in a white suit was standing on the steps, looking ostentatiously at her watch and then at the car, as if to indicate her annoyance at Leah’s late arrival. Leah felt an instant swell of resentment. It wasn’t her fault Grandma’s sedan didn’t have GPS. “Besides, a young girl needs her walking-around money. When I was young —”

“Right.” Leah had no desire to hang around and listen to the reminiscences of the old. She jerked open the car door and jumped out. “See you at five.”

“Try to memorize every patient’s face,” said Mrs. Minchel, the head of Silver Pines, as they hurried through the first-floor corridors. “Greet them, say a friendly hello. They may not remember their name, but you can remember it for them. Don’t say anything else, though. No conversations. Just ‘hello’ and ‘good evening.’”

Say hello, remember their names. Leah hurried to keep up with her boss. They were passing into the group rooms of the home — the activities room, in which a game of bingo was going on; the exercise room, where a teacher was leading some of the younger residents in a series of slow tai chi movements. Everyone looked fairly cheerful — maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, Leah thought. Maybe she could make friends with the old folks. Maybe they’d be charming and pass on some life lessons, like old people in movies.

Mrs. Minchel click-clicked on her high heels into the television room, where old people napped in front of the screen. A male nurse in blue scrubs was leaning over a woman so old that she appeared to be a shrunken figure with a tuft of white at the top, like a cotton ball pasted onto a doll’s head.

He stood up and turned around as they came into the room. Leah was startled at how young he was. Ringlets of red-brown hair, cut in an old-fashioned style, framed a pale, youthful face. He was very slender, to the point of thinness, and looked as if a high wind could blow him over. Even his scrubs hung loosely on his body.

“Hello, Brooks,” said Mrs. Minchel, her voice warming. “This is Leah, our summer intern. She’ll be dealing with the laundry, cleaning the game rooms, and doing a few other activities. Let her know if she can be of use to you in any way.”

Leah looked at him curiously, but he avoided her gaze, ducking around her on his way out of the room. The old woman he’d been talking to looked after him as he went, her wide old eyes dark and wet, her lip trembling.

“So why can’t I have conversations with the patients?” she asked. “He was.”

Mrs. Minchel turned around without a word to the old woman in the chair. “Because some of them have Alzheimer’s or dementia. They could become violent if you said the wrong thing. Brooks is an old soul — he knows what to say to them. You’re inexperienced.” And immature, her tone implied. “Stay away from the patients, and deal with the sheets.”

Whatever fantasies Leah had been entertaining about becoming friends with the charming old people who populated the home were slowly suffocated that first week. Mrs. Minchel’s edict that she not say anything to the residents besides “hello” and “good evening” stifled any attempts at conversation — not that anyone seemed all that interested in talking to the girl who pushed carts full of linens stained with puke, blood, and worse through the halls of the facility.

Besides, most of the residents were either silent or asleep when she saw them. The very oldest residents were kept on the third floor, where the rooms were big and open but always seemed to smell like dust and urine. On her third day, Leah trundled her cart into one and, thinking it was empty, began to lift the pictures on the nightstand in order to dust under them.

A sudden shrill screaming nearly made her drop the silver-framed photo she’d been holding. What she’d taken for a huddled heap of blankets had transformed into a screeching old lady, her tufted white hair standing up like a duck’s fluff, her mouth an open black hole.

The old woman was still screaming as Leah thumped into something behind her. Hands came up around Leah, circling her arms. Cold hands. She gave a cry of surprise and turned to see Brooks, setting her gently aside so that he could move toward the old woman in the bed. He bent down over her, making soothing noises, not English, just a rush of murmured words in a language Leah didn’t know.

She stood with her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides as the old woman lapsed into faint sobs and then silence, her wrinkled cheek pillowed on her hand while she slept.

Brooks rose to his feet. “Come with me,” he said, and took Leah’s hand. He drew her out of the room and into the corridor where she had left her laundry cart.

“Thanks,” she said. He released her, and she leaned against the wall. The old lady’s screaming had shaken her up more than she realized. She suddenly wanted a cigarette.

He turned around. He was still pale, the weird luminous pale she’d noticed when she’d first seen him. His brown-red hair curled against his cheeks and temples. His fingers were bloodlessly bitten, ragged with scraps of skin. When he moved to tug awkwardly at his scrubs, she saw the peach-colored circle against his skin. “You smoke?” she asked, pointing at the nicotine patch.

He shook his head. His eyes were an odd fathomless dark brown, like holes dug into the earth. “No.”

“I’m older than I look,” he said, neutrally. There was a tinge of something to his voice, not quite an accent. He sounded more like someone from an old movie, with a slightly stilted way of speaking. She wondered where he was from.

“It didn’t take that long,” he said with a shrug, the bones of his shoulders pushing up his scrubs. “I should go — I’m supposed to read to Mrs. Ellis.”

Mrs. Ellis was one of the second-floor residents. She was somewhere around ninety, with a kind, lined face and a smile that made Leah think that maybe getting old wouldn’t be so bad.

“You’re awfully nice to the old people,” she said. “You know what Mrs. Minchel said about you?”

“Are you enjoying Silver Pines?” asked Grandma Ruth. She and Leah were eating dinner the way they usually did, on TV trays positioned in front of the couch. Wheel of Fortune droned on in the background. Grandma had a habit of taping a whole week’s worth of game shows and then watching them all at once, as if there were actually a continuing story to them that she was paying attention to. It made Leah want to hit her head on the wall.

“No,” Leah said, forking up some meat loaf. Meat loaf, chicken, matzo ball soup, cholent, kasha varnishkes — her grandma had a rotating menu of food she cooked, and it never varied. Today was Wednesday, so it was meat loaf. It was so completely unlike the food Leah had at home, where her mother was always cooking macrobiotic meals with kale and locally farmed fish.

Leah stabbed at her plate. “With ancient people?” She saw a look of hurt flash over her grandmother’s face and quickly amended her comment. “Mrs. Minchel says I’m not allowed to talk to any of the patients. So it’s hard to make friends.”

“No one calls them candy stripers anymore, Grandma. And no, I’m the only intern. There’s a nurse, called Brooks. He’s not that old, but he’s — weird.”

“Weird isn’t necessarily bad.” Grandma Ruth had stopped eating and was watching TV again, murmuring the revealed letters under her breath. “What about your friends from home?”

Leah thought of the hundred unanswered texts on her phone, the e-mail addresses she had blocked. “They haven’t tried to get in touch.”

Grandma turned her gaze on Leah, her eyes bright and sharp. “I find that hard to believe. You always had such good friends. What about Rachel?”

Leah set her fork down. She couldn’t believe Grandma remembered Rachel. Though she’d looked after Leah enough times when she was little and Rachel had come over — she remembered Grandma leaning over them while they both were finger painting, laughing when they got the paint all over their clothes and faces. She’d thought Grandma was awesome then, like a parent who let you do anything you wanted.

“Really?” Grandma stood up, picking up both her plate and Leah’s. “That’s odd, since she’s called here for you at least twenty times.”

Leah looked back at the TV screen. The phrase up on the board was THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME. The laughter of the crowd rattled inside her head as she remembered her mother silently handing her a packed bag while Grandma waited in the driveway.

“Leah?” Grandma was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding the cordless phone in her hand. “It’s Rachel.”

Grandma just shrugged and held the phone out. Leah trailed across the rug and took it reluctantly, pressing the receiver to her ear. “Rachel?”

“Oh, my God, Leah!” Her friend’s voice gushed down the phone line, horrible in its familiarity. Just hearing Rachel talk flooded Leah’s mind with memories. The car, both of them in it, silent, stuck at a red light. The windshield wipers going. Rachel telling Leah she was lucky her mom was taking her to the clinic and paying. Telling her about a girl she knew who hadn’t had the money and had kept throwing herself down the stairs, trying to end it that way.

“I called you, like, fifty times,” Rachel said. “Look, I wanted you to hear it from me and not some other way. Ryan’s going out with Sadie.”

Leah felt like she were drowning in something that burned her eyes and choked her voice. Drowning in poison. “With Sadie? But she knows, she knows what he did to me —”

“I guess she doesn’t care.” Rachel sounded furious. “Look, just so you know, I’ve stopped talking to her, and so has practically everyone else. No one thinks it’s okay. I hate her now, okay? I hate her.”

Leah clicked off, cutting off Rachel’s voice. She handed the silent phone to her grandmother, who was staring at her wordlessly. “Don’t call my friends again,” Leah said, and headed upstairs to her room.

Leah was sitting on the back steps of Silver Pines’ kitchen. They were concrete and utilitarian. In fact, everything was utilitarian and plain out here. The nursing home looked nothing like it did from the front; it looked more like the blank back of a mall.

“It’s fairly evident, though, from the way you behave.” Brooks was leaning against the wall behind her, his long arms pale against the darkly painted clapboard. It was one of those drippy gray June days that seemed like an affront to summer.

“You’re insightful.” She’d been surprised when he’d joined her on her smoke break. She’d thought he probably wanted to bum a cigarette at first, but he didn’t seem inclined to do that. Instead he seemed to want to stare off toward the dripping trees in the distance.

She snorted. “You make it sound like you’re a million years old.” She dropped the butt of the cigarette onto the ground and watched it splutter out.

“I didn’t say you were. It’s just —” She toyed with the frayed strap of her sandal. “Look, I don’t mean to be bringing you down somehow. It’s true, I don’t want to be here. My mom sent me here as a sort of punishment.”

She looked up at him. His auburn hair curled in the humid air. There was a red mark on the inside of his wrist, probably where he’d pulled a nicotine patch off. “I was pregnant,” she said.

Leah sat in her room at her grandmother’s house with the window cracked open, staring at the glowing screen of her computer. The familiar blue and white of Facebook blinked on her screen.

She’d come home to a dozen texts urging her to check her Facebook. She’d found more messages there, telling her excitedly that Ryan had cheated on Sadie with another girl. Ryan had changed his relationship status to “It’s complicated,” and Sadie had abandoned her page completely. She hadn’t updated in days.

Leah struggled to remember what Sadie looked like: a mousy girl, with pale brown hair, who had always looked at Ryan sideways under the fringe of her bangs.

Sadie totally walked in on Ryan kissing Amanda at Mark Davis’s party.

It turns out Ryan’s been cheating on Sadie for weeks, months even.

Ryan’s such a dog, really, I don’t know why anyone likes him.

I do!!!! (The last with a picture of Ryan, looking soulful, attached.)

Sadie’s such a slut she got what she deserved.

I hope Leah knows it proves Ryan’s just a scumbag.

Sadie’s the slut, she’s nothing.

Nothing

Leah flipped the computer off and leaned out the window into the drenched night.

Silver Pines had a wi-fi network, though hardly anyone ever used it. The password was taped up in the big laundry room, where huge washer/dryers went all day long and the whole place stank of bleach and disinfectant.

For some reason, the best reception was in the residents’ rooms, especially the ones on the second floor. Leah sat on the floor of Mrs. Ellis’s closet, scrolling down Facebook on her phone. She could hear Mrs. Ellis’s gentle breathing. It made a strange counterpoint to the faint beeping from her phone as her page updated.

Lucy and Amanda had posted to Sadie’s page telling her she was a slut. Sadie hadn’t replied. There was more, too, more angry posts. It was strange to see the messages there, like watching someone hit someone else, someone helpless, in the face.

Part of her wanted to leave Sadie a message, too. Something like, I told you so. Or What did you think would happen? He wouldn’t even drive me to the clinic, you know that? What kind of person does that? It felt like a bad, ugly part of her, and it ached in her stomach like the undigested pit of a fruit.

The door to the room opened, and Leah hastily slid her phone under her sweater so that the glow wouldn’t give her away. She saw shoes crossing the floor, the blue hems of nurse scrubs. The creak as someone sat down in the chair next to Mrs. Ellis’s bed.

“Iris,” Brooks said. Leah jolted hard enough to nearly knock against the door of the closet. It hadn’t occurred to her that Mrs. Ellis had a first name or that Brooks would know it. “How are you feeling?”

Mrs. Ellis murmured softly. Leah had to lean close to the crack in the door to understand the words. “My husband,” she said. “He’s overseas, in Anzio. They won’t let me write to him. How will he know I’m thinking about him, if they won’t let me write to him?”

“I know,” Brooks said. His voice was low and soothing. “But your husband is a soldier. They know letters don’t always get through. You know how I know that? I was a soldier too, but not in the same war as Mr. Ellis. In the one before it.”

Leah’s mind raced. Brooks a soldier? Maybe he had been overseas in Iraq? But how could that have been “the one before”? Mrs. Ellis was ancient. If she’d had a husband in a war, it must have been World War II at least —

“You would have been a little girl,” said Brooks. “You probably didn’t know anything about it. The trenches and the Somme. The way the gas would come rolling across the fields, green and yellow. You’d have a few seconds to put your smoke helmet on, and then the place would be full of gas. It’s heavier than air. It would fall like a curtain and blot out the light. It could be hours before the wind took it away and you saw how many had died. Or sometimes they’d die right in front of you, clawing at their throats and their eyes. At least your husband was spared that.”

Mrs. Ellis murmured something soft. Leah thought she might be patting Brooks’s hand.

“Or we could talk about the things you do remember,” Brooks said. “New York. Do you remember the elevated trains? The Automat? Or when you could see a picture for a dime? I remember going to the picture palaces back when it meant something to be able to see a movie —”

The door swung open. Leah heard Mrs. Minchel, obviously standing on the threshold. “Is everything all right in here?” she asked.

“Of course you were,” said Mrs. Minchel, her doubt clear in her tone. “Now, come along, Brooks, we need you downstairs in the activities room.”

Leah heard the scrape as Brooks pushed his chair back and a soft noise of protest from Mrs. Ellis, drowned out by Mrs. Minchel saying something else in her strident voice. She burst out of the closet the moment the door opened, to find Mrs. Ellis looking at her with faded blue eyes, paler than the linen pillow she rested against.

“The Strand,” she said, in her rusted old voice. “On Forty-Seventh. It was the loveliest place.”

Leah was lying on the roughest part of the shag carpeting in her grandma’s house, just at the foot of the stairs. She was holding the receiver of the phone against her chest. It had been ringing on and off for the past hour, but she’d managed to mute it every time before her grandmother heard it.

She could remember her mother standing on the front steps of their house as Grandma’s car idled in the driveway. Leah standing with her green duffel bag at her feet. Her mom with her hand on Leah’s shoulder. “It’ll be good for you, being at Oma’s,” she said.

Her mother crossed her arms and pressed her lips together, staring off into the distance.

“He didn’t go with you,” said her mother. “To the Clinic.” She always said it that way, like the C was capitalized.

“He was busy,” Leah said, knowing even as she said it how threadbare the excuse sounded, like a worn-out blanket.

Her mother sighed. “Talk to your Oma,” she said. “She understands more than you think.”

It was poker night tonight, which meant Grandma was in the kitchen with her friends, playing cards. Leah could hear a whoop every once in a while when someone won a hand. The phone rang, and Leah muted it again. Only half her mind was on her mother. The other half was on Brooks and what she’d heard him saying to Mrs. Ellis. She’d looked it up online. The things he’d been talking about, trenches and gas attacks, they were things from World War I. From a hundred years ago.

Leah commenced a desultory search the next day, but Brooks wasn’t in any of his usual places at the old people’s home — not in the activities room or the TV room or the dining hall or on the concrete steps behind Silver Pines. She finally decided to check the second-floor rooms, starting with Mrs. Ellis’s. There was no one there; Mrs. Ellis was curled on her side, peacefully sleeping. With her tuft of white hair, she looked like a Q-tip.

Leah moved to the next room. Mrs. Ambridge was ninety-eight and had aphasia, which Leah had discovered meant that she mixed up words with other words. She was always saying things like “purple chocolate dinosaur” when she meant to be asking for another helping of spaghetti.

The first thing she saw was the blood. It was splashed across the white tile floor like a streak of scarlet paint.

Mrs. Ambridge was lying in her bed, her eyes shut. She looked as peaceful as a figure on a tomb. Her left arm was stretching out, because Brooks was holding her wrinkled, pale hand. His mouth was fastened to her thin wrist. Blood ran from his mouth, over her skin, splattering on the floor.

Leah gasped. She couldn’t scream; she couldn’t get enough air in to scream. Brooks heard her anyway, and his head jerked up. His eyes looked feral and wild. His chin was smeared with blood.

“Leah,” he said, his voice choked, and blood ran out of the corners of his mouth.

Leah ran. She didn’t remember running later, only that she had, out the door of Silver Pines and across the grass, plunging into the woods that ringed the property. She ran until the light was nearly blocked out, and something caught her arm and swung her around, so hard that she tripped over a root and fell to her knees on the ground.

She looked up at him, standing over her. Brooks. He wasn’t even out of breath, though he must have been chasing her. There was dried blood in the corners of his mouth and some spattered on his blue scrubs. Leah remembered reading somewhere that scrubs were blue because in the days when nurses had worn white uniforms, patients had reacted badly to the sight of red blood against the white.

He just looked at her. He was still the same Brooks, pale and tall and bony, with the same sad eyes. She tried to read those eyes, tried to read what was behind that sadness. Anger? Viciousness? She had seen what she was sure she was never supposed to see. Surely he cared.

“You could kill me,” she said. “But I won’t tell anyone about you. No one would believe me. Everyone already thinks I’m crazy.”

She shook her head. The birds were chirping in the trees. The sun was shining down on them. And there was a vampire standing over her.

“You were alive,” she said. “In World War One. All that stuff you said to Mrs. Ellis, that was true.”

He walked a little away from her and looked at the trunk of a tree. She could run, she thought, but he’d just catch her. He was clearly faster than she could ever be. “I was human then,” he said. “I was alive. Signed up at sixteen, just to get out in the field. Lied about my age. I didn’t know what it would be like. The shells, the guts everywhere. I wanted to be a medic. Wear a red cross. But the gas came one night while I was sleeping and tore out my lungs. I was buried and I woke up like this.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why. I must have been bitten while I was alive. I don’t even remember it, but it must have been enough to get the virus in my bloodstream.”

“I can eat,” he said. “I breathe. I go out in the sun. I smoke cigarettes. I drink coffee. But blood — blood carries memories.”

He took a shallow breath. “The beat of the human heart is the music of remembrance,” he said. “When I drink blood, I see the memories of the person whose blood I’m consuming.”

Leah shrank back. He turned and looked at her. And laughed, without humor. “You think I’d want your blood?” he said. “You’re sixteen. What do you remember? The mall? Your friends? The boy who dumped you?” He shook his head. “You’re thinking of movies. The ageless vampire and the teenage girl. But the truth is you — you’re a child to me. Inside, I’m an old man. No matter what I look like.” He touched his hand to his face, the smooth skin there, with an expression of distaste.

His eyes narrowed. “I guess you do,” he said. “You’ve known some pain. But — why do you think I work here?”

“Old people don’t fight back?” Leah said, her words harsher than she’d intended. She shouldn’t make him angry, she knew. But he didn’t seem angry. His eyes were far away.

“They remember,” he said. “The way they are outside, that’s the way I really am. They know what I know. Some of them, they remember New York before cars. Horses pulling advertising wagons through the streets. A nickel to ride the subway. The first time anyone ever saw a plane take off. Irving Berlin, now that was real music. In the twenties I was a rum runner. You don’t even know what that is, do you? You don’t know a time when people sewed their own goddamn buttons on. You don’t remember calls being put through by manual switchboard exchanges. You never lived without a cell phone in your hand and a computer on your lap.” His hands were fists. “You don’t understand my world. Telegraph and radio and Model Ts. My world is dying. When the last person who remembers my time dies —”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I am. I don’t need blood to survive, but I need it to feel. If I don’t have it, I’m afraid of what I might become.”

“I’ve lived a long time, Leah,” he said. “In all those years, I’ve never met another vampire who was all right.” He touched the blood at the side of his mouth. “The things that are commonplace to you, computers and satellite and the Internet, are abominations to me. I remember my father telling me about the first message sent over the telegraph,” he said. “You know what it said?”

“Nothing,” Leah muttered, and took a swig from her glass of ginger ale. “The first telegraph message.”

“I know. I didn’t realize you’d been studying your history trivia.” Oma looked more closely at her. “You look pale. Are you all right?”

Leah said nothing. She was thinking about the phone buzzing under her hand with unanswered calls from her mom and of Brooks saying, I need blood to feel.

Oma sighed. “I know,” she said. “I’ll never understand.” Leah looked around the kitchen, saw the curling old drawings she had done in kindergarten still pinned to the fridge. There were no other drawings, nothing newer. She was the bas-yekhide, the only child. “You know why Mom sent me here?” Leah said. “Don’t you?”

So Leah told her. About Ryan, and about the way he’d made her feel special and loved and unique until the day she came to him about the problem she thought was theirs and found out it was only hers. How her mom had taken her to the clinic. The drugs they’d given her that made her feel far away and floating. How it hadn’t hurt then but it had hurt later, when she felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach, but nothing had hurt like finding out Ryan wouldn’t answer her calls. That he had another girlfriend. That he looked right through her like she were invisible.

When Leah was done, Oma reached up and patted her blue-white hair into place. “Leah, Leah,” she murmured, and then opened her arms. “Come here.”

Folding herself into her grandmother’s lap, Leah could feel how small her Oma was, how birdlike her bones. For all that, she felt strong, as if there were a structure of hard wire under her soft, wrinkled skin. “I thought you would hate me,” Leah said.

“Shayna maidel,” said Oma. “Let me tell you something. You know I used to be a receptionist when your ma was growing up, didn’t you? For a doctor. It was a long time ago. They didn’t have clinics like the one you went to. Women would come in, ones who couldn’t afford to have a child, whose husbands beat them and their kids, or little girls sometimes, younger than you, who’d been forced. And he had to send them away. The law said so. He would have gone to jail otherwise. So a lot of them found someone else to do it for them. They’d come back later, with knitting needles or broken glass still stuck inside them. Sometimes their stomachs would blow up like balloons from the infection. That was when we knew they were going to die. It was a terrible time, Leah. Do you think I’d want something like that for you?”

“I don’t —” Leah said as her Oma stroked her hair. “I didn’t know you felt like that about it.”

Oma laughed softly. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I don’t understand life,” she said. “I wish more people remembered what I remember. It’s one thing to hear about it, but if you remember it, it makes all the difference.”

“I knew,” said Oma. “But I thought I should let you tell me about it. You’re my grandbaby and you’re safe — that’s the most important thing. More people understand than you think. You should talk about it, Leah. It’s secrets that poison us. When you let the truth out, that’s when you’re free.”

The sun was shining the next day, for the first time in what felt to Leah like weeks. Big bars of yellow like sticks of butter slanted in through the windows of Silver Pines, across the rugs in the activities room, in the hallways, and in Mrs. Ellis’s room, which was empty.

Mrs. Ellis had died the night before. Sometime while Leah was talking to her Oma, Mrs. Ellis had gone to sleep and never woken up. Leah stood in the hallway, watching the orderlies taking away her things: the small cardboard boxes filled with photographs and books, her faded patchwork blanket folded on top.

Mrs. Minchel was standing in the hallway, shaking her head. “Leah,” she said, looking up sharply. “You shouldn’t be here. Go down and see if they need help in the laundry room.”

“They’ll go to her family,” said Mrs. Minchel, not unkindly. “Now, don’t worry about it, all right? She was old. She had a full life.”

Leah did an about-face and half ran down the stairs, through the lower hallway, and out the back door of the Pines. Even the sunlight didn’t do much to beautify the concrete stoop and dirty on-ramp that led to the delivery door.

Brooks was sitting on the ground by the back door, in his scrubs, his hands dangling over his bony knees. His shoulders were shaking.

He didn’t look up, so she sat down next to him. As Leah watched him, he scrubbed away his tears with wet hands, streaking them across his already-blotchy face. She had thought somehow that there might be blood in his tears, but they were clear, like anyone else’s.

The wind blew, rattling the leaves on the trees, blowing trash across the concrete lot.

“Being alone,” he said. “They’re dying. One by one. They’re dying and one day they’ll all be dead and I’ll be alone. The only one who remembers.”

He shook his head. “I’ve tried. To live among the living. To be like them. Every day I wake up though, and those memories are like a dream. The only thing that seems real is my mortal life. The blood . . . The blood gives it back to me for a little while.”

“That’s why you don’t want my blood,” she said. “What do you think will happen? When they’re all gone? Won’t you have to — to go on somehow? You said you don’t need blood to live.”

“Not to live. Just to want to live,” he said, and then: “I think I’ll fade. When they’re all gone, I think I’ll be erased. I’ll be nothing.”

He snorted and looked away. Leah thought of the talk she’d had with her grandmother the day before, and the way she’d woken up feeling different. Lighter. Ryan had been a dream, a dream she’d had her whole life that had ended with her mom driving her to the clinic, pale, her hand on Leah’s knee, saying over and over, “As long as you’re sure this is what you want.”

Leah had been so angry that it hadn’t been Ryan that took her, that he loved her so little, that it hadn’t occurred to her to think about it the other way: that she had a mother who loved her so much.

“It seems to me like maybe you get to choose,” Leah said. “We all have the way we thought our life would happen. And then there’s the way that it does happen. And you can cling to the way you imagined it would be, or you can accept what really happened and let it change you.”

“Forgetting’s not so bad,” she said, and smiled. It felt strange to smile, but good. Ryan was the past now: Ryan would be forgotten, papered over with new dreams and new loves. Just because one dream had ended badly didn’t mean they all would. “As long as you remember enough to do it differently the next time.”

He looked up and over at her. For the first time, she thought, she saw a spark of real life in his brown eyes. “When you forget,” he said, “when people forget you, you disappear.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. It was cold, hard under her touch. “Even if you change, I won’t forget you,” she said. “I won’t let you disappear.”

Leah could hear her Oma moving around downstairs, humming to herself as she set the table for dinner. The sun was going down outside, all red and gold with streaks of pearl. It was beautiful. It had been a long time since she had realized a sunset was beautiful.

She thought of the orderlies carrying out the small boxes of Mrs. Ellis’s things, of the way a life could be packed up, totaled in a handful of objects, a few photos, the fragile dust of memories.

Then she dialed an unfamiliar number. It rang a few times before it was picked up.

“Hello?” Sadie said, nervously. Leah’s name must have flashed up on her phone. It took courage to answer, Leah thought.

“I know,” Sadie interrupted. “If you’re calling to yell at me, go ahead. Everyone else already has.”

“I’m not,” Leah said. “I saw the messages people were leaving on your Facebook. Saying that you’re nothing. I just wanted to tell you, I don’t think that. You’re not nothing. And you and me, we should talk. We have the same — the same memories.” She paused. “Everyone needs someone to talk to. So they don’t forget.”

“Then we can remember to forget him together,” said Leah, and leaned back against the pillows of her bed.